Advice from Chris

Thanks to a little advance planning, I arranged for others to do some writing this week when my own time and creativity are lacking. Today, Chris, one of our interviewers, tells you what comes to mind when he thinks back to his applicant days.

It’s hard to believe that it has been over a year since I applied to Fletcher. I remember checking the Admissions blog and GAMS website every day, hoping that decisions would be released. I was a nervous wreck. Fortunately, I was assigned to a new project at work and was able to dive right in — a nice distraction.

With the advantage of hindsight, my advice for all those reading is to take a deep breath and relax. Accept the fact that there’s little you can do at this point with regard to your application. All the hard work is done! Yes, look at the Fletcher website every now and then, but by this point you’ve probably read everything on the entire site.

This downtime between application submission and decision release is when life more-or-less returns to normal for a month or so (depending on where you’ve applied, obviously). You had a life before the GRE exam and grad school applications: go back to it! Go on your dream vacation to Peru or Malaysia now, because once you have heard back from all your schools, there’s going to be a lot that you need to do (e.g. looking for housing, getting financing in order, or brushing up on your foreign language skills).

I realize this is easy for me to say now, a year after the fact. However, one thing I’ve learned in life (thanks to Marcus Aurelius) is that while you may have little control over what happens to you, you have complete control over how you react to life’s events.